Thread: Привет!

Originally Posted by Dukes

Cheers for the replies though. I'm aiming to get to conversational level, so a little way to go yet, but hopefully what I've written made some sense at least!

Well it mostly made sense... can't expect to get it 100% right first time (in fact I can't remember a time where I've ever submitted an exercise and got it 100% right first time).

Originally Posted by Dukes

I'm pretty shoddy at English when it comes to knowing grammatical and language-type terms, so to try and do it in Russian too is going to be a laugh.

Interesting that you should say that actually - the strange thing is, you will probably learn about English in the course of learning Russian. The German writer Goethe once said "He who knows no foreign language knows not his mother tongue", and it's true. The more you learn about the differences between Russian and English, the more you get to know English itself (for instance, Russia has cases whilst English has none, English has a complex tense system whilst the Russian one is comparatively simple).

Originally Posted by Dukes

Anyone know any decent books at all? I might look at picking up a GCSE level textbook, could be a good start.

Personally I think The New Penguin Russian Course is good, you can get it for under £4 on Amazon (I found this out after paying £12 for it in Waterstones, lol). It goes from absolute beginner level to equivalent of A-level standard. It's not perfect, some people complain it has too few exercises in, it certainly won't teach you perfect pronunciation as there is no audio, and it focuses quite a lot on grammar (personally I like this aspect, but a lot of people would hate it). But I'd still definitely recommend it.

There are many, many sites that have audio clips - use them. This site has some, Livemocha has some, even Wiktionary has some. Also adding native Russian speakers to chat with on Skype will help you.

(I think I made this post way too long... oh well )

Thanks a lot Demonic_Duck, that's really helpful! Going to nab that book, it's just what I've been looking for.

As for learning a bit more about English, I've been talking to a penpal I met on here, and I've already started picking up on different ways our language works - must be hard for Russians - or anyone for that matter, to learn English. It's a right pain!

Just annoyed how crap British schools are for making us learn languages - it should be forced upon I think!